The IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more. Just enter a chunk of text with at least 100 recognized words and Watson will break down your (or Hitler's or Donald Trump's) personality compared to other participants. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A
on Jul 27, 2015 -
80 comments

Wham-O (previously) revolutionized the circle, the torus and the sphere, but they once did something innovative with the humble rectangle: Wham-O Giant Comics (alternate ad here), intended to be a quarterly magazine but ultimately the only issue released by the company. You can read it in its entirety here and read critiques of its contents here. It's an anthology whose contents run the gamut of genres, so if you don't like a story, you can just skip to the next. Of particular note are Radian and Goody Bumpkin, drawn by Wally Wood (previouslies).
posted by BiggerJ
on May 22, 2015 -
13 comments

With the final episode of Mad Men about to air, Consumerist takes a look at 72 real-life brands featured on the show, how they were depicted, how they were really advertised then (and how some real ads were fictionally credited to Don Draper) and how their advertising (and ownership OR existence) has changed in 5 decades...
posted by oneswellfoop
on May 15, 2015 -
56 comments

Infamous troll, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, has annoyed Twitter users by using purchased Twitter advertisements to bypass blocks and target controversial political messages at selected groups. By focusing ads at specific user demographics, he was able to spend very little money while optimizing for outrage. [more inside]
posted by theorique
on May 6, 2015 -
71 comments

A trio of Haruki Murakami's Advertorial Short Stories: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Onward spent massive sums on advertising J. Press in the print media. The classic ad format, often seen on the back cover of lifestyle magazine Popeye, showed a Japanese or American man telling a colorful story about their favorite trad clothing item. In 1985, as Japanese pop culture went in more avant-garde directions, Onward came up with a new idea — asking up-and-coming novelist Murakami Haruki to write a very short story inside each month’s advertisement for magazines Popeye, Box, and Men’s Club.[more inside]
posted by byanyothername
on Apr 22, 2015 -
2 comments

Madison Avenue is looking differently at so-called product placement, the decades-old practice of inserting name-brand cans of soda, gadgets, and cars into the scenes and dialogue of TV programs. [...] The days of jamming the mention of a Subway sandwich or Dr. Pepper into dialogue in, say, CBS’ “Hawaii Five-0” or NBC’s “Chuck” or the CW’s “90210” — all actual examples — may be coming to a close.
posted by Chrysostom
on Feb 13, 2015 -
92 comments

In the past, when Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have done commercials for actual companies, they were considerate enough to offer audiences two distinct flavors: "Uniquely Odd", as in the case of the bizzare-yet-polished Old Spice series of ads and "Downright Uncomfortable" as in the case of Absolut Vodka (previously). Recently, they have produced another pair of ads for your viewing pleasure: General Electric for the former category and Totinos for the later.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI
on Nov 6, 2014 -
37 comments

Each week, the ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ industry observes a sacred ritual: Together, but not quite in sync, dozens of websites embed and then post the longest segment from John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight. That John Oliver's weekly video(s) will go viral is, at this time, a given. Whether or not the posts that embed those videos will go viral is another matter altogether. Each time around there are winners, losers, and mere participants. Here's what happened this week: "The John Oliver Video Sweepstakes" [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue
on Nov 4, 2014 -
50 comments

...while [Time Inc.] claims that none of its titles lose money, it has seen earnings fall by nearly 65 percent since 2006. The number of advertising pages in the flagship Time has dwindled by 50 percent over the past five years. Even People is sputtering: Newsstand sales slid 12 percent last year, and the news budget has been cut in half. Layoffs have become an annual rite. In the past four years, Time Inc. has churned through three CEOs and endured nine months during which there was no single executive running the company.

Putting on a brave face. It isn’t easy to do without, but to do without while giving the impression that little has changed offers necessary courage to one living in an otherwise terrifying situation. Women had no power over the volatile state of the world, and after conscription was introduced, they also lost control over which jobs they held and where these jobs took them; if they could succeed in appearing strong and unruffled on the outside, perhaps on the inside they might also feel capable of succeeding in the midst of the uncertainty that had become their lives
posted by ellieBOA
on Jul 31, 2014 -
12 comments

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